I’ve been reading a book about “New American Barbecue”. It discusses the usual shout-outs to Texas, various styles from Kansas City and sauces from Alabama and North Carolina. It is too focused to discuss Yucatecan or Argentinian barbecue, much less South Africa, Australia, Jamaica or Morocco.
Yet it does discuss Chicago and Santa Marta style from Central California (grilled with basic rub on red oak, no sauce). It talks about barbecue pitmasters with cooking school credentials opening up fancy fusion places in New York, Chicago, New Orleans, Dallas. It gives credit to LA for a thriving Korean barbecue culture.
I’d never heard of Santa Marta barbecue. Are all of these widely recognized as a thing, or is the author reaching for straws? What is your favourite style and place?
I don’t know if it is a misprint in the book or you’ve misread it, but I think it is referring to Santa Maria barbecue, a.k.a. Central Coast barbecue, e.g. F. McLintoks, Hitching Post, Jocko’s, et cetera. This is more in line with what inlanders would think of as a steakhouse or chop house, although cooked over a wood fire (typically local red oak) with a rub and served with salsa and pinquito beans rather than a molasses/brown sugar-and-vinegar red sauce. It is not Southern style barbecue that anybody east of the Rockies would recognize.
I’m not going to express any opinion about Chicago-style barbecue (other than I hope it is better than their take on pizza) but I’ll say that barbecue is one of the few things that gets better the further South you go.
Well, anywhere with a significant Korean immigrant population, anyway. I don’t think it has caught on as a fully adopted American cuisine like “Italian” and “Chinese”, and I shudder to think what Midwesterners would do to banchan, but I’ve usually been able to find decent Korean BBQ when traveling, even in the food desert of Las Cruces.
Yep, Santa Maria style BBQ is a thing. I grew up in Santa Maria and I’ve never heard anyone call is central coast style. The steak house chop house style that Stranger talks about is a bit different than the road side BBQs that make it special. Chicken is equally featured to top block or tri tip. It is also cooked much quicker than eastern styles and a long cook time would be two hours. It is the best style of BBQ and I’ve blown many Texan minds over the years cooking them a little Santa Maria style BBQ.
Normally, I’m coming into these threads to bring up Santa Maria style so it was a weird twist to see it in the first post.
Here is a picture of a pretty typical parking lot BBQ with the giant pots of beans on the side of the grill. It nice because the whole town used to smell like BBQ and strawberries in the summer.
Does the book define barbecue? I ask because a lot of people make a sharp distinction between bbq (low & slow) and grilling (hot & fast, at least relative to bbq). Barbecue is probably in a closed cooker, grilling tends to be more uncovered. KBBQ, to me, is actually grilling.
I’m a bbq hobbyist and Santa Maria seems to almost always refer to tri-tip over red oak. What do you think?
ETA: @Oredigger77 added some more while I was composing, thanks.
I love North Carolina sauce. I also am partial to the southeastern pig focused BBQ. I like BBQ less the further west you go. I do like a good brisket. I do not like very hot spice added.
The book interviews a Santa Maria pit master who insists he is barbecuing and not grilling, and who never uses tritip despite it apparently being known for that.
The book is about modern riffs of traditional barbecue so does not really define or limit it.
The most famous place for Santa Maria style BBQ is probably Jocko’s in Nipomo and they don’t have tri-tip on the dinner menu. A tri-tip is a roast shaped cut, feeds four or more, and takes too long to cook to order.
Hey, 'Cruces was NOT a hotbed of variety, but it was surprisingly diverse considering the size of the town. And it had (may it remain fondly remembered) Hebert’s Steak Fingers the likes of which shall never be equalled! EVER! (okay, I do a half decent homage, but still).
Seriously, after growing up in Cruces and then moving to (non-Denver, non-Boulder) Colorado, my food options decreased, despite 4x the population. Sure there was slightly more of everything else, but there was zero worthwhile Mexican food for over a decade. And the Mexican options here seem to believe in tomato based salsa derivatives, which frankly taste like spiced marinara sauce.
I would submit any state (which is probably most other than CA and NM) where you cannot get green chile on a cheeseburger by default is a true food desert!
– recovers from rant –
As for BBQ, I’m on the vinegar/mustard side of the spectrum. I find most sweet sauces overwhelm the flavor of the meat with the cloying sweetness. In fact, if I want something on the sweet end, I look for Asian fusion styles, that smoke with hoisin or the aforementioned Korean style BBQ sauces. Those normally add a more mild sweetness while also adding layers of flavor.
For shame. Chicago has some of the best pizzerias in the US. I won’t diss other cities, but if your only experience is pan or Sicilian pizza, you need to get to Chicago more often and check out more pizzerias.
I think that has more to do with people confusing jocko’s, hitching post, far western, etc as Santa Maria bbq instead of steak houses like Stranger mentioned. In reality, Santa Maria style BBQ is large roasts that take a long time to cook and is sold until it’s gone. They use the same wood, grill and normally seasonings but the parking lot grills have more to do with what people consider traditional BBQ than the steak houses.
If you looks at the profiles in magazines like sunset you’ll see they normally talk about the Elks club, Rotary, or Kiwanas along with many other charitable organizations. These “home chefs” will cook for a thousand people a day. My brother in law’s father cooked for the Nipomo catholic church’s BBQ crew for years until the health department started getting involved and they would feed two or three hundred people every Sunday. I think the lack of need for advertisement for the non profits makes them less visible than the big resteraunts.
It is possible that those are two distinct styles; The (Casmalia) Hitching Post refers to their style as “Central Coast Barbecue” (understandable as they are just a couple of miles from the coast, and techincally on Vandenberg Air Force Base) but they are clearly variations on a theme of wood-fire roasted meat with a spice rub and no sauces or oils (other than a butter baste for scallops, lobster, and shrimp).
Tri-tip is definitely a noted specialty but it seems to cover pretty much any primal cut of beef, pork loin or rib, pork or lamb loin/chop/rib, chicken, quail, and even salmon and steelhead, but not any sweetmeats/organs, whitefish, or other other meats. The key element is being cooked over coastal redwood instead of charcoal, hickory, or mesquite.
Thank you for explaining that. As a local, that’s something I probably should have known before today. BBQ is a really loose term in Southern California where I grew up.
